Le Labo review

Walk into a Le Labo and someone will weigh out your fragrance in front of you, print a label with your name and the date on it, and hand it over in a box with the instruction to let it rest in the fridge for a week. It is a very good piece of retail theatre.

It is also, in perfumery terms, slightly backwards. Fragrances are usually macerated — left to rest after blending — precisely so the materials integrate before the bottle is sold. A fragrance blended in front of you is a fragrance that has not yet done that. The ritual sells the idea of freshness in a category where freshness is not the goal.

That is the criticism. Now the case for the brand.

The house style

Le Labo's compositions, mostly by perfumers including Frank Voelkl and Alberto Morillas, share a recognisable character: dry, woody, faintly dirty, deliberately ambiguous between masculine and feminine, and built to smell like skin rather than like a fragrance. Nobody else does exactly this, and it is the reason the brand grew from a single New York shop in 2006 into a genuine cultural marker.

Santal 33 is the famous one — sandalwood, cardamom, iris, leather, violet — and it is a properly constructed fragrance that happens to have been worn by roughly everyone in every creative-industry office since about 2015. It has not got worse. It has become a uniform, and at $310 for 100 ml that is a difficult purchase to justify on distinctiveness.

Another 13 is the one we would buy instead. It is built around ambroxan, jasmine and moss, and it produces a strange clean-skin effect that sits very close to the body. It is the brand's best composition and much less common.

Rose 31 is a rose rendered with cumin, cedar and vetiver — a rose for people who do not like rose. Thé Noir 29 is tea, fig, bay and tobacco, and is the most wearable in the range. Bergamote 22 is the bright one.

The numbers

Each fragrance is named for its dominant material and a number that refers to how many ingredients it contains. It is a good naming system and it carries a small dishonesty: ingredient count is not a quality measure. A thirty-three material composition is not better than a twelve material one, and some of the best perfumery in history is extremely simple.

Transparency

Better than the fragrance category norm, which is a low bar. Le Labo names its perfumers — still unusual — and is relatively open about the principal materials in each composition. It does not publish full material breakdowns, which no commercial house does, and it does not disclose the natural-versus-synthetic split, which some customers want and which the brand's laboratory aesthetic arguably implies.

City Exclusives

Le Labo releases fragrances tied to specific cities, available only there except during a brief annual window. Commercially this is clever. As a customer proposition it is manufactured scarcity around compositions that are, on the whole, less interesting than the permanent range.

Ownership and price

Estée Lauder acquired Le Labo in 2014. The shops, the ritual and the house style have been preserved carefully; the main visible change is that there are now a lot more shops.

Prices run from around $95 for a 15 ml travel size to $420 for the largest formats, with 50 ml of most fragrances around $200. Refills are available in store at a modest saving. This is the lowest value score in the fragrance category for us, and it is not close.

What Santal 33 did to niche perfumery

Santal 33's ubiquity is worth understanding, because it is the clearest case study in what happens when a niche fragrance succeeds too well.

The composition's central trick is a large dose of Javanol, a synthetic sandalwood material with an extraordinary radiance — it projects far more than natural sandalwood at a fraction of the cost, and it has a slightly milky, slightly animalic character that reads as skin. That radiance is exactly why the fragrance is so recognisable from across a room, and it is why it became inescapable.

It also spawned an entire genre. Since 2015 there has been a steady supply of Javanol-forward woody fragrances from brands at every price point, including several supermarket dupes that get within touching distance for under $40. The material is not proprietary and the structure is not complicated.

That puts Le Labo in an awkward position. The thing that made Santal 33 special is now a commodity, and the brand's answer has been to keep the price at $310 and lean harder on the retail experience. It is a defensible commercial strategy and it is not a formulation argument.

The verdict

Buy Another 13 or Thé Noir 29 in a 15 ml travel size first. The compositions are good enough to be worth owning and the prices are high enough that a full bottle is a decision.

Think hard before buying Santal 33. It is a fine fragrance that has stopped saying anything about the person wearing it, which for a $310 purchase is the whole problem.